Thoughts about Death

Death in My Life

   By coincidence, my reading during the last few days has been about issues relating to death. It started with a review of Katie Roiphe’s book, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, followed almost immediately by my conjuring the book into my Kindle and starting to read it. The next day, among the forwarded mail that reached me was an issue of Columbia Magazine with an interesting article, “Making Light of Death,” about “ . . . the search for a cleaner, smarter alternative to burial . . . .” Those readings prompted me to think about death and dying. But since for me, thinking requires writing—always for myself and sometimes also for others—I start with my own limited experience.

   Only once was I myself close to death. Although I well remember the occasion, I was not aware at the time of the precariousness of my condition. It was flu season and I had not felt well during the morning I taught my classes at San Francisco State. So I decided to rest up at home and come back for my scheduled evening class. When I walked toward my car, parked on Junipero Serra, a bit uphill from the campus, I fainted. I was next aware of lying on a bed in the hall of Kaiser Hospital, waiting for a room. Blank some more. I then recall a number of people hovering over me and a doctor saying that her mentor recommended forcing ice into the stomach of someone with a bleeding stomach wall.  When it was all over, my stomach wall was fixed by means of major surgery and I had received a total of nine pints of blood—a lot of blood!

   I recovered and, until now, never came that close to dying, at least not as far as I know.  So let me now turn to my experiences of deaths of people close to me.

   Although I am 89 years old, I have never actually witnessed any person’s dying.  Consider five plausible candidates. My father passed away in the hospital in New York City while I was living in Pittsburgh. In his eighties, he was brought there after a fall that broke a hip, but then passed away as a result of a stroke or a heart attack. My mother, with my support, did not authorize an autopsy. 

   Some years later, my mother, now living on her own, with my son Mark, then also living in New York, looking in on her, was hospitalized into an institution that specialized in ailments she didn’t have. Rather than trying to correct that goof, I hauled her out and flew her to Pittsburgh. It was a small plane flying at about 3000 feet above the terrain. While I sat next to the pilot enjoying the view my mother, alas, could not get a look at, lying on her cot.

   An operation was a necessity (I spare you the details); it was successful. Accordingly, Fannia and I scouted out possible places for her recuperation. But as it turned out, she passed away a few days after the surgery, early in the morning before I arrived on my visit to the hospital.

   My father and I were always on good terms but never really close. His interests focused on his business, with my brother much more interested in that and related issues than I was. On the other hand, I was close to my mother, to the point of daily phone calls to her at the end of my Northwestern office hours during the years after my father had died.

   The third occasion was devastating. Fannia, my wife of nearly forty-two years, had survived a so-called routine heart valve operation. However, after leaving intensive care, she passed away from post-operative bleeding. I remember vividly what I took to be her smile at me when, in the middle of the night, she was on her way to undergo measures of resuscitation. They turned out to be futile. Fannia never regained consciousness.

   The fourth instance was that of Carl Hovde, my close friend since January 1945, when both of us took the Columbia College placement exams for freshmen to be. Now, decades later,                            Carl’s smoking caught up with him. I visited him, living with his second wife in Connecticut. It was gratifying to have a most civilized conversation; he was not in pain. A few days later, Carl was felled by that lung cancer. While Carl Hovde and I were a well-known duo in College—no sexual implications and, as far as I know, no such suspicions. We always stayed in touch. He married a Bryn Mawr friend of Fannia’s—and, curiously, we both became deans, with Carl’s Columbia deanship meriting him a New York Times obituary.

   My brother, Hans Martin (H. Martin after we arrived in the US), was two years younger than I and passed away about ten months ago. We had been on frequent telephonic speaking terms for the many years we had lived in different cities, occasionally visiting. But about a decade ago he took uncompromising offense at what I had written about him in my autobiography and never spoke to me again. He did not tell me just what of those passages got him into that state, while I, rereading the passages about him numerous times, could never find anything that merited such wrath. So we were of course not in touch before he died. Since I found out about his death by accident—no family member had informed me—I had no details. He died of  “heart problems,” his daughter Sue informed me when I inquired by email.

   Of these deaths, Fannia’s is the only one that seriously affected me. We had lived through her endocarditis together, an illness that had her hospitalized, seemingly forever. We had briefly tried a stint at home, but we did not have confidence in our ability to do all  the (for us) complicated things that needed to be done to keep her going, so it was quickly back to the hospital. From that long siege, Fannia was liberated in time for us to go to Bellagio where I had received a residency at the Rockefeller establishment. We had a good time in Bellagio and, afterwards on a trip to Vienna and Budapest. But almost immediately after getting back home to Pittsburgh, Fannia needed to be hospitalized and, at the age of sixty-five, subjected to that heart valve operation.

   While I don’t brood about death, I do read the Times’s obits daily, skipping sports heroes about whom I know nothing. But I read them to find out about their lives, often extensively accounted for, and mostly take only casual note of the causes of their deaths.

   I don’t brood about death and, indeed,  for most of my life, I didn’t even think about it. But now, while I certainly don't brood,  I do think about it: if not at 89, when? And my thoughts are very different from those of the Roiphe examples I have read so far. Perhaps because I have led a thoroughly bourgeois—read “conventional”—life, I see its end as a natural disappearance when not coerced by untimely illness or mishap.

   To be sure, I bear unmistakable physical signs of mortality, most notably in the form of a substantial loss of body mass and various forms of cumbersomeness mostly caused by faltering knees. The most noticeable mental sign—that is, the most noticeable by me who is hardly a neutral observer—is its effect on my memory, especially of the short-term variety. Needless to say, everything I do now I do more slowly than during a younger past, in part beset by medical issues, at this point not life-threatening ones.

   Those will come. But however you get there, the fact is that the major premise of the standard Aristotelian syllogism holds: All men are mortal. Hence, since I am a man . . . .

   It is interesting that there are people able to ignore that fact. In the Roiphe book Susan Sontag is depicted as pining not to die while knowing well what is inevitable.

   The Columbia article about “the search for a cleaner, smarter alternative to burial” sketches out the difficulties and costs of somehow disposing of the remains of those who have passed away with no realistic (that is broadly acceptable) solution in sight. It is a suppressed premise of many an account of dying and death that there should be a world in which there is birth and life but no death. That thought remains unexpressed, because, surely, the idea of life as we know it without death to end it is literally unthinkable.

  I conclude with a comment about me. I’ve led a most satisfactory life—and a long one—so when the inevitable happens, I urge those who still await their own end should understand that what matters is not that I died, which everyone does, but that I had good life, not by any means so common. That calls for celebration, if it calls for anything. Certainly not for mourning.